


Past Repair

by ambyr



Category: Dessa (Musician)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Dark, Don't Have to Know Canon, Gen, POV First Person, Resurrection, Unreliable Narrator, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-24
Updated: 2012-12-24
Packaged: 2017-11-22 08:38:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/607905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ambyr/pseuds/ambyr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They call her the Lady of Birds, and she loves all manner of broken things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Past Repair

**Author's Note:**

  * For [xenoglossy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/xenoglossy/gifts).



> Thanks due to Framlingem for the beta.

I saw an angel, once. Just like in the icons, her wings dripped gold, streaked with copper, and her eyes were impossibly wide.

That was the second time I died. Third. No, second.

I saw an angel, and her eyes were wide enough to drown in, to wash all your hurts away. She raised a hand, and I thought she was welcoming me, beckoning me home.

"Your Lady needs you," she said. "Go back. Go back and serve."

An angel said that. Didn't she? And she put her hand to my chest, and pushed.

* * *

My Lady. Lady of Birds. They named her that, when she was a girl. Named her for the sparrows that flocked around her, for the way the limp and broken-winged flew again at her touch.

It was a miracle, and the Church welcomed it. Welcomed the fragile body that housed the miracle with open arms. Sheltered her, guided her, channeled her gift.

Until she no longer wanted to be held. Until she no longer wanted to be led.

Then they named her heretic.

* * *

“I need the sky,” she said. That was all she asked for: the whole world, and the sky that covered it.

When she was younger, she had wandered the cloistered gardens between lessons. That was the way I had first seen her, with a dead wren cupped in her hands. We shared a smile, novitiate and child saint, as it sprang from her opened fingers. 

I took my vows remembering that moment, that conviction.

By the time I took my vows, she was already shut away.

* * *

Does a miracle have limits? Can it grow brittle and fade?

The Church needed her gift in the halls of the powerful, in the naves of the faithful. They did not want it spent without need.

(If it can be done to anyone, for anyone, is it a miracle at all?)

My Lady no longer wandered the gardens, and birds no longer flocked to her. I no longer swept the courtyards. We had grown from children to prisoner and jailer.

“I need the sky,” she said.

The jailer is the one with the key.

* * *

I remember her standing in a field at evening, the grass stained crimson by the half-set sun, with crows on her arms and an owl on each shoulder. Her head was thrown back, laughing, and the birds laughed with her.

(I don’t remember leaving the cloisters. I don’t remember what we did, or didn’t do, in leaving. I don’t remember other stains.

Isn’t that the better memory?)

* * *

The first time they found us, the birds told us they were coming. The birds told us, but we did not hear.

We lived simply then, in a small hut in the woods. It was the escape she had dreamed of, the escape they could not let us have.

I still had my sword, with the Church’s sigil in the hilt. It cut the faithful as well as the infidel. One fell, and two, and then the third’s sword struck my neck.

Birds swept in on him in a storm of feathers as I fell, gagging on blood.

* * *

I woke with my head in her lap, her hands on my unscarred throat.

“My Lady,” I said, and the words came out smoothly.

She was looking away, at the corpses.

“They will never let me go,” she said. She said it in a high, clear voice, like a lark trilling. No fear, no anger, only fact. “Never.”

“My lady?”

“Come.”

* * *

In Ironport we took a room by the docks, with water-stained walls and a bare pallet, nothing more. My Lady cared only that it had a window. It faced the sea.

We had no money for passage, but we would have found it. We would have, but the Church found us first. There were more of them, now, and a sagging ceiling above us instead of the open sky.

I told my Lady to flee, and the last I saw of her was her legs dangling from a cloud of white-winged gulls.

I had no such escape.

* * *

They did not bury me, heretic and outcast that I am. They cast me into the river, and the river carried me away.

She found me in the estuary, where the egrets pecked at my eyes.

(How do I know this? I never saw it. She never told me. Perhaps the angel did.)

She found me, and she made me whole. Made rotten flesh firm, made still lungs move.

That was the second time. Or was it the third?

She looked at me, now, when I opened my eyes.

“They will never let me go,” she said, “and I will not flee.”

* * *

We turned away from the sea and went north, then, north toward where my Lady had been born. It was harder for me, now, harder to run, harder to raise a blade. But we were no longer hiding. The birds flew above us like a river, and when the Church found us on the road the hawks and eagles did not wait for my sword before diving.

It was more than birds that followed us. My Lady stopped and sang in the open fields, in the town squares—wherever the people of the land would listen to her hymns. 

In the first village, she touched a child who had been swept away in the spring flood, and he breathed again. In the second, they brought out a shepherd who had fallen from crumbling cliffs, and she laid her hands on him.

She sang, and the people followed. The dead rose, and they followed her as well.

* * *

We were an army now, an army of iron ploughs and pitchforks, and so the Church sent an army as well. We had my Lady, my Lady of Birds, and our faith. They had fire and steel and skill, and faith of their own. They called my Lady a demon, called me—thrice-reborn—and her followers worse. 

They fell, and we fell, and I fell as well. The field was stained crimson. (Like another field—or was there only ever one?)

* * *

She touched my face this time when she woke me. I recognized her, my Lady of Birds. How could I not? She touched my face, and she looked at me with love.

But I did not recognize the field, or those fallen around us. I did not remember which had followed us, and which had ridden toward us with lances raised.

“My Lady?” My throat was hoarse.

“Shh,” she said. “Be still.”

I was still. But I could not be silent. “My Lady? Did we win?”

“I can bring them back,” she said in her high, sweet voice. “I can bring them back. We _will_ win, in the end.”

“What—what will we win?” 

She smoothed my hair out of my face. “You don’t remember, do you?”

“I remember you. I remember the Church. I remember fleeing. I remember—we stopped. Why?”

“Oh, my love.” She had never called me that before. Had she? “I can bring them back. But you—I’ve brought you back too many times, haven’t I?” How many times? I wanted to ask. I couldn’t. My throat was too sore. My throat, that her hands were touching. “I had to try. But it would be a mercy, wouldn’t it?”

My Lady?

Her hands tightened.

* * *

I saw an angel, once. Didn't I?

Didn't I?


End file.
